Unstoppable Force vs An Immovable Object: It’s Way Cooler Than I Thought.

by David Klemke on January 28, 2013

I’m sure everyone has heard of the idea of an unstoppable force meeting an immovable object. For anyone who’s interested in scientific principles it can be a pretty irritating thought experiment as you wrangle with definitions, principles and the limitations of your own knowledge of science. Personally I never really thought about it much past the point of thinking that they’d both be converted to pure energy (this makes the assumption they’re both physical objects with mass) but as it turns out there’s a much, much better explanation. One that makes me feel a little dumb for not researching it a little further:

The idea itself is in fact a paradox since the existence of one or the other of the two parts of the equation means that the other simply can not exist. If you have something that is immovable then its impossible for an unstoppable force to exist and vice versa. Indeed diving into the semantics of it like the video does makes their existence even more problematic, even if we ignore the energy requirements and just go by the laws of physics. I have to say that the end result of them simply passing through each other was not something that I would have expected but then again I only did 6 months worth of physics at university.